Smugglers' Cove
by Parlanchina
Summary: An accidental drabble that happened when I was trying to come up with examples for a prompt-driven writing game. Sam's stuck between a rock and a hard place, and she's not very happy about it. Gen, with a dash of Sam/Milner if you really squint. Mostly about friendship. And smugglers who are about to have a bit of a headache.


**Smugglers' Cove**

Sam struggled to her feet, her head spinning. She reached out and steadied herself with her hand. The wall was cool to the touch. It had been hot upstairs. A real May scorcher. But down here it was cold and damp.

 _I must be underground_ , she thought.

She winced. The men who had dragged her in here hadn't been particularly gentle, and her hands, elbows and knees were grazed where she had struggled against them. She was sure her tights were laddered – and they were nearly her last pair, blast it. Massaging her wrists – she was certain there would be bruises there later – she put her back to the wall and squinted, trying to force her eyes to adjust to the gloom.

The room she was in was sparse; really there was only the door they had slammed behind her and a crude ledge cut into the wall on one side. In fact – yes! The whole room appeared to have been carved out of the rock.

 _Definitely underground then, maybe in one of those old smuggler tunnels Mr F was talking about._

"Not quite so abandoned, after all," she said aloud, her voice sounding oddly muffled in the deep, dank prison in which she had found herself.

Forcing herself to keep calm – and to definitely, absolutely not think about the shiver of claustrophobia that was creeping up her back – she went to the door and tried it. It was sturdy and old, maybe even old enough to have been used back in the days when the little fishing village they were staying in had been the heart of black market trade.

It was supposed to have been a simple assignment: just cleaning up a few local drunks who were giving the Home Guard a little trouble. Then Sergeant Brooks had slipped on the wharf and broken his arm, and they'd had to stay overnight; all four of them in the two rooms above the tiny post office, the post mistress shaking her head at the impropriety of it (even if Sam had had a room to herself and Milner, Mr F and Brookie had all crammed into one room). And then, when something had clattered outside in the small hours of the morning and all four of them had piled out to investigate…

Sam swore and kicked the door, remembering how pale Brookie had been when one of the men outside had grabbed his broken arm. Feeling childish, she shook her head at herself.

"Keep it together, Stewart," she admonished herself.

It was like something out of one of the books she had read as a child. Now, what would one of those plucky heroines do? Struck with inspiration, she pulled a hair pin out of her Victory Roll and set to work on the lock, her tongue between her teeth. It took a lot less persuasion than she had expected and soon she was standing in a long, dark tunnel stretching off in both directions. There was a dim light at one end, and the sound of someone laughing.

 _Not that way, then,_ she thought.

She turned and nearly tripped over an oar someone had left against the wall of the tunnel. Swearing at the noise she made Sam flattened herself against the rock, but after a long, tense minute she realised no one was coming to investigate. Her heart hammering in her chest, she realised she was going to have to make a go of it before someone found her.

 _Now or never, old girl_ , she thought.

No sooner had she taken one step towards the place she hoped was the exit, from the other end of the tunnel – the one with the light and the laughter – someone made a sound of distress that stopped her cold.

She knew that voice.

"Milner!" she gasped.

"Stop it," said someone else – and she knew that voice too, though it had lost some of its authoritative edge. "Leave off."

In a flash she remembered the way the men had been talking when they dragged the four of them down into the tunnels. They were going to teach them a lesson, they said. They were going to make them pay…

It hadn't even occurred to her that it was anything more than an idle threat. Three policemen and an MTC driver would be missed, after all – and the station knew where they were. Surely, the blackguards weren't that stupid.

An awful crack echoed up the tunnel, like someone being hit very hard with something solid.

Again, Mr Foyle shouted for them to stop.

 _No, not Paul,_ she thought. _Not him._

She squared her shoulders and picked up the oar.

Her friends were down there.


End file.
